Gustave Moreau

Moïse Lévy de Benzion, Chateau La Folie, Draveil, France
Confiscated from the above by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg and taken to the depot Jeu de Paume (inv. LB 136), January 1941 and transferred to the depot of Lager Peter, October 27, 1944
Recovered by the Monuments Men and sent to the Munich Central Collecting Point (inv. 1285/9), June 27, 1945
Repatriated to the French Government on October 10, 1946
Restituted to the heirs of Lévy de Benzion, November 26, 1946
Sale: Hôtel Drouot, Paris, November 28, 1949, lot 66, illustrated
Mrs. Robert O. Driver, France
Acquired from the above in 1987

Pierre-Louis Mathieu, Gustave Moreau: Complete edition of the finished paintings, watercolours and drawings, Oxford, 1977, p. 158, 344, no. 271, illustrated
Pierre-Louis Mathieu, Gustave Moreau: Monographie et nouveau catalogue de l'oeuvre achevé, Paris-Courbevoie, 1998, p. 371, no. 302, illustrated

One of the most inventive and influential painters of his generation, Moreau had a critical impact on the development of art through the twentieth century. Few artists share his ability to seek out, hone and dispense such a variety of references and pictorial traditions to create exquisite, mystical and iconic compositions that are enduring and relevant more than a century later.

Despite his near total embrace and exoticization of an idea of the East, Moreau maintained a reverence for European pictorial traditions and narratives. References to mythological and biblical stories are often overtly expressed. In other instances, and as seen in La fée, Moreau adopts his own artistic language, synthesizing disparate ideas and references in order to create a singular vision that is immediately recognizable as his own. His majestic fairy is adorned with a crown and laden with jewels, carrying a scepter while astride a fantastic animal, soaring together through an imagined landscape. Similarly winged creatures populate the sky and animate Moreau’s composition, their forms expressed through a variety of broadly brushed and intricately drawn techniques.

Unlike many nineteenth century painters who dismissed watercolor as a preparatory device, Moreau believed his were complete compositions in their own right and exhibited many of them at the Paris Salon.  From the 1870s onward, Moreau used the medium to masterful effect, creating compositions on paper with striking color harmonies, akin to cloisonné enamel in their delicacy of execution and minute detail; the effect can clearly be seen in the dress, jewels and feathers of the central figure group in La fée. In 1886 Moreau held a major exhibition of his watercolors at the Galerie Goupil — a testament of his particular passion for the medium as it was the only comprehensive retrospective of his works during his lifetime

Moreau had a distinct creative process that was driven by an insatiable appetite for source material. He was drawn to the exotic, and, although he never left Europe, he was entranced by representations of faraway places that he saw in the Moghul miniatures at the Musée du Louvre. He sought out these references at other exhibitions of Asian and Middle Eastern art that came to Paris, like the Exposition des beaux-arts de l'Extrême-Orient at the Palais de l'industrie in 1873-74, and incessantly made sketches to document what he saw. He developed preferences and gravitated towards Eastern examples: Persian, Indian and Egyptian, as well as medieval images, while completely ignoring the rococo filigree that was fashionable during the second empire (Geneviève Lacambre, Gustave Moreau between Epic and Dream, Chicago, 1999, exh. cat., p. 15-16).

An early owner of La fée was Moïse Levi de Benzion and, like Moreau, he had expansive interests and an insatiable curiosity, as evidenced by the depth and breadth of his extraordinary collection. He was successful entrepreneur who owned a major department store in Egypt, “Grands Magasins de Benzion,” and maintained residences in both Egypt and in Draveil, south of Paris. At Draveil, he held an astonishing collection of paintings, drawings, Chinese and Far Eastern art objects, tapestries, rare books and antiquities. In 1941, the Nazis raided the property and plundered de Benzion’s collection and brought it to the Jeu de Paume. The inventory from this time attests to the extraordinary quality and diversity of this collection, where Greco-Roman and Egyptian antiquities were presented alongside furniture from the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, paintings by history’s greatest artists, including Rembrandt van Rijn, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Alfred Sisley, among innumerable others. 

Please note that this work is sold unframed.